Pandaren don’t bother me any more than the other silly anthropomorphic races in the game. I think there are more furries than human-like humanoids. So, sure, why not more? Beyond that, the game has never been all that serious. Haris Pilton and Wowpo can coexist.

Monks? Sure, why not. I won’t play one. I played without auto-attack in Allods Online, and I just didn’t like it. I do like that Monks are full hybrids, though, able to fill any trinity role. I’m not surprised they went that way.

Pokemon-ish minipet battles? Seems like a silly thing to dev spend time on, but maybe it will work out for them. I did love Pokemon back in the day when I had tons of free time, so it’s not like I’m opposed to it. I’m just not in that “time rich” bracket any more, so it won’t do much for me.

Talent tree amputation is a little strange, but hey, if it results in a system where players can respec talents on the fly for free, that’s a step closer to what I’d like anyway (full respec on the fly, all the way down to class choice), so I’ll call that a cup half full.

No, all the big controversial stuff doesn’t matter much to me. The part that bugs me far more than I expected is a little throwaway line:

“No flying until max level”

Yeah… I’m hoping that’s only in Pandaren territory. If it’s worldwide, well… color me displeased. Really displeased. Flight is a marvelous tool for exploration, and I don’t want to have to buy the latest expansion to access flight. I know, I know, some have argued that flight trivializes ground-based content, and there’s some truth to that. Thing is, flight is freedom, flight is exploration. Losing those don’t sit well with me.

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I love flying too, it makes the world seem much larger to me and more real, If i really want explore nooks and crannys of the world I can with flying.I hope it will be lost only for the new area , it seems rather unfair if they take something like that away. The pokemon vanity pet thing is just creepy( argent squire vs. wolvar pup!?) Not right!

IMO, flight should’ve never, ever been added to the game. It’s caused so many problems that Blizzard’s had to bend backwards to keep disabling it so people don’t bypass content. Flight took a huge world and made it tiny.

I just think it’s amusing that Blizzard obviously knows they messed up circa Burning Crusade in this regard but they can’t quite erase it.

Syp, you’ve got that completely backwards. If you, as a designer, have a problem with players flying over your content, and your solution is “force them to the ground”, that’s Bad Designer, No Twinkie territory. That’s Tarkin design; all stick, no carrot.

Similarly, Nils, you’re completely wrong. Exploration is fostered by greater methods by which to explore, not by constraining players.

@Tesh: “Flight is a tool in the WoW mechanic box. If anything, it’s underdesigned and underutilized.” This is true, and unlikely to change. Flying would need new mechanics to work properly, including being something more than swimming in the air. The devs put things on the ground. They could put them in the air, but they mostly prefer the ground. It’s easier for them to work in and easier for us to play in. I’m not alone as a player who gets terrible disoriented in the air (and water).

Grounding players isn’t a stick. It’s an acknowledgement that the content was designed for players on the ground.

Still missing the point, guys. If players are skipping your content, that means your content isn’t something they want to play. The answer isn’t to force them to play through it, the answer is to find what content they *are* playing and give that to them.

Beyond that, how many players are actually *skipping* content by flying over it? XP has to be gained somehow.

Imagine the devs give out all epics of the next raid within one week. The second week the number of players raiding drops dramatically. Consequently, that raid couldn’t have been fun, according to your theory, Tesh.

I think I wrote about that Fun Fallacy more than enough in the last year or so. If you still think that goals (e.g. stadning on top of the mountain) can be allocated some quantity of ‘fun’, independend from the constrains (rules) that form the journey, then, well ..

Nils, you’re still arguing against a “fun” strawman. I understand that those are easier to argue against, but do try for a little more intellectual honesty.

My position is simple: flight allows players to get to places they cannot access any other way, and allows views of the world that cannot be seen any other way. That facilitates exploration. That’s it. Please also note that exploration is not the same thing as grinding or questing; that’s the whole point. It’s an optional activity that makes the world more whole and realized, an aid to immersion.

As for content, I maintain that if players are bypassing your content, the answer isn’t to snap them back into it. The problem is that they don’t want to play your stuff, and it’s your job as a dev to make it desirable, not necessary.

I have not argued for giving players loot on demand, or for an unknown quantity of fun. You’re coming up with that on your own.

I absolutely agree that flight to places that can’t be reached in any other way adds something to the game. I also agree that flight itself adds something to a game.

But it also subtracts something from the game. And in my opinion the constrains (=I can’t fly) that make me walk on top of the mountain are critical to the fun. To just fly there is not as much fun.

My earlier example. Why do you force them to fly? Allow them to teleport to all those places and see whether they fly. I can predict that they are not going to fly and then, according to you, we should scrap flight, because it forces player to do something that they obviously want to bypass.

—As for content, I maintain that if players are bypassing your content, the answer isn’t to snap them back into it. The problem is that they don’t want to play your stuff, and it’s your job as a dev to make it desirable, not necessary.

I have not argued for giving players loot on demand, or for an unknown quantity of fun. You’re coming up with that on your own.

But my example does exactly that !?!
If players stopped raiding (bypassing that content) if they had all the loot, then, according to you, the problem is that they don’t want to play your stuff, and it’s your job as a dev to make it desireable, not necessary to do it.

The constraint that players get loot only by actually raiding should therefore be lifted, according to you.

There would certainly be those players who teleport. It’s still not the same as flying. Hovering, for one, is impossible with a pure coordinate teleport system.

As for content, I think you’re confusing content, exploration and loot. The end of exploration is not gear. It is not loot. It is simply seeing the sights, the journey itself, much of the time. Certainly there would be players who would press that loot button, but I’m not saying anything about loot when I talk about flight and exploration. I’m talking purely about seeing the world.

As it happens, yes, I agree, if your game would be reduced to “press button, get loot” if given the option, you’re not designing anything that’s all that great to actually *play*. I think WoW (and pretty much all DIKU MMOs) have given up that fight, though. There are still bits that are fun to play, but it seems to me that the majority of the time spent is more about getting loot or that next level ding (or achievement or pet, whatever) than actually playing. Maybe that’s inevitable when the game is relatively easy to master, or passable mastery of the gameplay doesn’t really take full mastery of the mechanics… and you’re trying to get players to play for dozens or hundreds of hours.

Callan has been pretty harsh on that sort of “padding” in game design before, and I largely agree. It seems like that fits neatly within your Fun Fallacy, too, actually.

Actually, I like trying to reach the carrot in front of me. The combination of goals and rules (constrains) that create journeys inside the possibility space is absolutely fun for me – and for most players in my opinion.

The idea that we should create some kind of journey that is fun irrespective of any goal is not completely wrong. Some things are fun even without goals. But goals, like loot, can add a lot to the fun, in my opinion.

“Still missing the point, guys. If players are skipping your content, that means your content isn’t something they want to play.”
Content doesn’t exist in isolation. Reward systems can change it. It’s a well-established bit of psychological knowledge that extrinsic rewards will boost activity when added, then reduce it beyond the baseline when removed, which if we apply this to fun, will yield content which would normally be fun, but which has been tainted by a bad system. This could be a screwed-up endgame-leveling interaction, a gear system, take your pick of problems, WoW has plenty to offer.

Nils, I kind of think what you shoot for is that harder == more real an exploration. Being harder for you isn’t for the sake of challenge. It’s because it being harder makes it more intense and being more intense enblazons the exploration more onto your conciousness than swimming through the air in a lazy, sleepy way would.

I’m describing that in neutral terms. But I think Tesh is almost a purest explorer, or atleast when he’s exploring he’s purest explorer. If my hypothesis above is right, you just don’t correlate with his expectations, nor his yours.

Does the above description work at all or I’m way off? Just trying to set up some lighthouses to navigate discussion by.

Except I imagine you’d beat me consistantly in head to head puzzle pirate games, Tesh? So how does that work out? 🙂 That’s why you (‘scuse the pun) puzzle me – you seem to hit hard gamist play to win at times, yet advocate exploration alot?

I was just tentative on the purist explorer thing just in case it wasn’t a comfortable recognition.

But yes, sometimes I do play to win, and dagnabbit, I’m pretty good at it. It’s just that… that’s not why I play all the time. Thing is, since I see in myself that I prefer different activities at different times, I don’t think it unreasonable to expect the same in others. Bartle’s profiles were never really meant to be wholly embodied as immutable psychological avatars of perfectly polarized humans. Someone may well be a mix of them all, and that balance also might shift over time.

I see value in strong “gamist” play because it really can be fun sometimes, at least for me. Ditto for the other reasons to play (though my Killer aspect is weak, I really did love Street Fighter 2 back in the day, and I was good at it). I think gamist play need not compete philosophically with exploration; we’re just not really wired to be all absolute, all the time. MMOs in particular, as “big tent” games, tend to have tidbits for everyone.

…that said, it is debatable whether such diluted design is sustainable in the long run, and with real world production values, there actually is competition in how devs prioritize their design. Each game has to pick its audience and aim accordingly. I think that games that try to be everything to everyone lose everyone in the end.

I think that Exploration as a principle is valuable to making a virtual world interesting and immersive, but it can no more be the only goal than full on Achiever, all the time. It’s weird, maybe… I think games benefit from tapping different Bartle goals, even to the degree of high focus in places, but they can’t be too diffuse.

“But my example does exactly that !?!
If players stopped raiding (bypassing that content) if they had all the loot, then, according to you, the problem is that they don’t want to play your stuff, and it’s your job as a dev to make it desireable, not necessary to do it.

The constraint that players get loot only by actually raiding should therefore be lifted, according to you.”

I think I do understand your point Nils, but it is one that the core game (WoW) and many other MMO’s strive to be. Progression via loot.

If in WoW, you could only progress via exploring then I do side with your point – if exploring is the progression then ways to bypass that go against the only point in the game.

I believe that Tesh’s point is that exploration (if anything) in WoW, isn’t a consideration anyhow – so why hamper it needlessly.

Of course, loot as sole means of progression is a whole other post in itself – as you alluded to in the quote – as a developer issue.

I think limiting flying to the cap is a terrible idea. The only thing that makes BC content bearable now is the fact that you can fly at 60. The design of those zones is terribly dated. Further, it’s damn near impossible to make progress in the archaeology system without access to flight (and hopefully an epic flyer at that). Finally, the Lich King zones and the Cataclysm zones have been designed with player flight in mind. Why would you want to break the later zones in both expansion areas by forcing players to do everything on land mounts?

Tesh,we’re just not really wired to be all absolute, all the time.
Except games literally are wired to be a particular abosolute, all the time. So how does that work out, when we don’t act the same way a game does?

I think this disjunct between peoples natures and games structure just isn’t widely known, let alone accepted. Alot of people think a game can somehow match them, when it can’t, as people are changeable and this isn’t a fault in the game that it can’t. Even while blizzard try to plaster over this by bringing out a patch every five minutes (even though people swear the adjustments are ‘needed’, I would swear the patches are just juggling the content to juggle the audience. The patches patch the audience, not the game)

Nils,
Just to jump back to this:Imagine the devs give out all epics of the next raid within one week. The second week the number of players raiding drops dramatically. Consequently, that raid couldn’t have been fun, according to your theory, Tesh.
As you mention in your article “But that does not mean that introducing that button had increased my long term fun.”

I think your beating on short term fun, when the real problem actually is that a patch that lets you teleport instead of ride to a dungeon essentially has made a whole new game. Actually, the important part of this is that it’s taken away the old game, the one where you ride to the dungeon. Taken it away forever. You wanted to have fun playing that one. So is short term fun really the problem, or developers who, while your playing a damn game, snatch it out of your hands constantly?

Cap’n, yeah, that’s pretty much it. Exploration is already throttled by level gating and such, to the point where if you can even happen to bypass a particular ground-based chokepoint, you’ll still get smooshed by baddies in places you’re “not supposed to be in” for your level. Flight doesn’t change the mechanics of the game’s progression schemes, it just lets you see the world much more freely.

In fact, I’m not even particularly fussed about progressing. I have an article brewing on that, but the short form is that once I got to level 68 for Cold Weather Flying, I’ve pretty much ignored combat entirely. I’ve spent 95% of my game time since then just flying around and taking screenshots. I’m not interested in progress on the leveling curve, I’m interested in looking around.